Paul Col­li­gan, CEO of Premiumcast.com

This inter­view is part of my series “Mak­ing Money from Pod­cast­ing” (read sum­mary “9 Suc­cess­ful Tech­niques for Mak­ing Money from Pod­cast­ing”) where I inter­view pod­cast­ers who are actu­ally gen­er­at­ing rev­enue from their pod­casts. There are many tech­niques, and here’s one person’s tale of how he’s mak­ing money from podcasting.

Build an audi­ence and sell pre­mium podcasts

Paul Col­li­gan is the CEO of Premiumcast.com, a com­pany that builds and sells an RSS-subscriber man­age­ment tech­nol­ogy. It’s dif­fer­ent than tra­di­tional pod­cast­ing in that Pre­mi­um­cast cre­ates per­son­al­ized RSS feeds. With tra­di­tional pod­cast­ing, the pod­caster sends out a sin­gle RSS feed that every­one sub­scribes to. The pub­lisher has no con­trol over that rela­tion­ship with that lis­tener. The lis­tener is in com­plete con­trol, choos­ing when to turn you on and off.

With a per­son­al­ized Pre­mi­um­cast RSS feed pod­cast pub­lish­ers can con­trol the rela­tion­ship with every sin­gle lis­tener. And one of the pri­mary things you can do with that con­trolled rela­tion­ship is charge for the pod­cast. Since it’s per­son­al­ized, you know the sta­tus of every sin­gle sub­scriber. For exam­ple, if sub­scriber #423 is up for renewal and they don’t pay, you can turn off their spe­cific feed, but keep #424 going since they did renew.

Pub­lish­ers also have con­trol of how pod­casts are deliv­ered for new sub­scribers.  With tra­di­tional pod­cast­ing, when a per­son sub­scribes, the first pro­gram they get is the one that’s most recently pub­lished. With a Pre­mi­um­cast, when you get a new sub­scriber, you can begin their pod­cast feed at episode #1 and deliver it sequen­tially over time — once a week, once every day, whatever.

Inter­view (Time: 12:37)

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There’s a whole host of other per­son­al­ized con­trol mech­a­nisms you can deliver or impose in terms of types of con­tent (e.g. audio, video, PDF) and tim­ing of the con­tent. It’s essen­tially up to the pub­lisher how they want to man­age their ser­vice for their customers.

Pre­mi­um­cast does not man­age the publisher’s pay­ment nor take a per­cent­age of what the pub­lisher charges. Pre­mi­um­casts are sim­ply a flat fee. The cost is $97 a month for the stan­dard ver­sion and $147 a month for the unbranded ver­sion. The unbranded ver­sion means you can erase all men­tions of Pre­mi­um­cast on your feed and on your site, and make it appear 100 per­cent your own.

How to cre­ate a pod­cast that peo­ple are will­ing to pay for

Most of the peo­ple who take advan­tage of Colligan’s Pre­mi­um­cast are offer­ing up “how to” shows and train­ing pro­grams. His advice for oth­ers who want to achieve suc­cess sell­ing their pod­casts is to sim­ply under­stand their audience’s needs. For exam­ple, if some­one is prepar­ing for a cer­ti­fi­ca­tion in some type of busi­ness, hav­ing a prepara­tory pod­cast is highly valu­able and peo­ple will pay for it. Just take a look at what hap­pens as peo­ple are walk­ing out of book­stores, said Colligan.

He’s seen cases of pod­cast­ers who used to offer up a show for free and then started charg­ing for it. That doesn’t work, said Col­li­gan, espe­cially when there are tons of sim­i­lar com­pet­i­tive pod­casts that are avail­able for free.

Colligan’s top advice is to have an audi­ence first before you try to sell a pod­cast. If you don’t have one, don’t try to sell a pod­cast. Gath­er­ing an audi­ence can be done in mul­ti­ple ways. You can build an audi­ence by run­ning a free pod­cast and use it to pro­mote your paid pod­cast, or you could spend the money on search adver­tis­ing and build an audi­ence that sees your paid podcast.

Here are Paul Colligan’s top three tips on how to suc­cess­fully sell a premium/paid for podcast:

1. Know exactly what you’re deliv­er­ing and what its value is.
2. Know exactly who you’re deliv­er­ing it to.
3. Paint a mes­sage of the value of the con­tent, not the tech­nol­ogy that’s deliv­er­ing it. (e.g. call it a “train­ing pro­gram” and not a “podcast”)

For more, lis­ten to my inter­view with Paul Col­li­gan as he describes all the dif­fer­ent ways you can man­age and mon­e­tize a Pre­mi­um­cast. Plus he offers up some more great advice on how to make the most money offer­ing up a paid podcast.

More episodes of “Mak­ing Money from Podcasting”

• Never Not Funny (Tech­nique: “Par­tial show for free – full show paid”)
• Per­sonal Life Media (Tech­nique: “Build your own media net­work of pro­gram­ming and sell adver­tis­ing against it”)
• Preg­tas­tic (Tech­nique: “Get your own sponsors”)
• Elsie’s Yoga Class (Tech­nique: “Sell an iPhone appli­ca­tion along with your podcast”)
• Mac OS Ken (Tech­nique: “Give away five shows for free, make them pay for the sixth”)
• Alaska HDTV (Tech­nique: “Get your own sponsors”)
• Duct Tape Mar­ket­ing (Tech­nique: “Build your brand to sell your services”)
• Screen­Cast­sOn­line (Tech­nique: “Give away every other episode. Make them pay for the rest.”)
• Izzy Video (Tech­nique: “Give away every other episode. Make them pay for the rest.”)
• Slate Gabfests (Tech­nique: “Inte­grat­ing spon­sor­ship with the show’s editorial”)
• Wiz­zard Media (Tech­nique: “Got audi­ence? We’ll get you spon­sors. Or, get spon­sors on your own and we’ll insert the ads” PLUS “Sell an iPhone appli­ca­tion along with your podcast”)
• Man­ager Tools (Tech­nique: “Build your brand to sell your services”)
• ESPN (“Build your own media net­work of pro­gram­ming and sell adver­tis­ing against it”)
• Mevio (Tech­nique: “Moti­vate your audience”)

David Spark helps busi­nesses grow by devel­op­ing thought lead­er­ship through sto­ry­telling and cov­er­ing live events at Spark Media Solu­tions. He blogs at The Spark Minute and can be heard and seen reg­u­larly on ABC Radio, Cranky Geeks with John C. Dvo­rak, and KQED in San Fran­cisco. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact David, or leave a com­ment below.

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